I am trying an experiment together with Ceata: a series of photography workshop which just started yesterday with a small session held in the Politehnica University of Bucharest campus.
![[photography workshop]](https://nicubunu.ro/pictures/atelier/ceata/20090804-foto/132-img_5605.jpg.medium.jpeg)
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Following one of my graphic tutorials I got a request from one (supposedly) US girl: she say she lost the originals of some photos and need some help to recover a few who were watermarked by a hosting site.
I decided to not investigate further her identity and motivation and since the images are small and blurry anyway, I tried a bit of fixing with GIMP, nothing fancy, just a few minutes with the clone, shear and maybe the healing tool.
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Now being on different continents, I am a bit disappointed I cannot ask her in exchange to work for me as a model in a photo session, I am really look for models at this moment.
Liked the comic strip tutorial from the other day? Now here is another one, about what I like to call steampunk photography, I wrote this one last year but until today it was not published properly (now is together with my other graphic tutorials:
And stop for now with the tutorials, I don’t have other in the pipe for the immediate future.
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After taking the photos you may want to do some more than just looking at them, like, why not, create a comic strip, so here is a tutorial for doing this with GIMP and Inkscape:
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I tried some close-ups with various parameters for the shot and found myself unable to definitely chose what I like better: a wide or shallow depth of field, for each of them I can see pluses and minuses, so I turned out to some external opinions.
Unanimously, the non-photographers (and a photographer interested mostly in portraits), opted wor a wide DOF, and I can understand why, the "more is more" doctrine, the picture shows more things, wich many people consider a good thing:
Still not convinced, I turned to past colleagues from the photography course Cursphoton, and I found voices opting for the shallow DOF, or what I like to call in this case "less is more":
I find the difference interesting and telling, but obviously the definitive question is still "who is the target for the photos?" and this may tell you which option to prefer…
And of course I tried another version of the photo: dark background and an intermediary aperture value, it tells a completely different story:
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In some previous posts I talked about a photography course I took, now that it ended is the time for a review (frankly, the time was a couple of weeks ago but being lazybusy, only now I managed to sit down and write something): back when I registered for it, very little information was available on the net about it beside the official site.
In very few words, I can say the course was within my expectations, but this does not tell much, it may tell something about my ability to set my expectation level or to perceive value, so there is a clear need for more words… At 6 weekends, the course is short, you will learn some stuff but also will feel the need to continue learning on your own, do not expect to walk in a total noob and walk out Cartier-Bresson.
Regarding theory, if you read a good photography book and/or a couple of websites, the course will add very little, but I found more important the opportunity the practical experience of a real studio and working in a real studio, as well as the interaction with other photographers: both the Marius and Vlad, the teachers and your fellow colleagues (about a dozen of classmates).
In a very conventional style I will try to outline what was, from my subjective point of view, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good: for me, the best part was the open atmosphere, it was pretty much like an open conversation where you didn’t feel afraid to contradict the teachers at times and also felt your opinion matters. You are treated like an equal.
The bad: the "Photoshop" class was a wasted day, I could not care less about what are the shortcuts in some proprietary Adobe software or how awesome some people think are the plug-ins from Alien Skin. But I expected that, too bad that I didn’t have ready a “each time you pirateillegally download an expensive proprietary graphic editor and your job would be accomplished fine with a Free alternative, God kills a kitten".
The ugly: the course has an online presence, a discussion group on Yahoo and also a very inactive and less populated flickr group, you can easily see a lack of experience about online communities. In fact the entire "community" part is lacking, most likely I won’t get it touch with the colleagues.
As a conclusion, I find it a positive experience at a right price (for me it was an impulse buy, finding the news about it when I was browsing an online photo gear store, but I am odd with money spending and priorities), so if you can afford, go for it.
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On top of being a model this week-end I also took my round as a photographer and my imposed theme was about a shallow depth of field. And a real difficulty of such a shot, beyond overcoming your own lack of technical and artistic knowledge, is to make a, relative large, group of unprofessional models to behave and pose for you. My failure was epic, as usual.
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Is not like I’m starting a new career as professional model or something like that, it was late in the night, only a few of us remained at the photography course and she was stuck with me and an imposed theme (high light contrast on two subjects). So I pretend I’m taking photos (well, I really took some photos, but with the lights laid for another photographer in the scene they are all crap and unusable).
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This week’s homework for the photography is about storytelling: take a known picture, The Marriage Feast at Cana by Hieronymus Bosch in my case, and cut it in pieces telling a story, just like a story board, pretty much a cinematographic experience.
So I took the picture and told the story as straightforward as I could (the text in the picture is in Romanian, read below for an approximative English translation):
![[cana storytelling]](https://nicubunu.ro/pictures/cana.jpg)
I found the story too predictable and thus boring and uninteresting, so I tried another version, telling something different than the old Bible story (again, an approximative English translation below):
![[cana storytelling]](https://nicubunu.ro/pictures/cana-blasfemie.jpg)
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Since I received complaints about the portraiture "making of", I reduced the number of uploads and avoided posing some portraits candidly shoot this week-end at the "object photograpy" session of the photography course. So don’t blame me for the lack of content :p
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This week-end at the photography course we did practice on shooting some objects. Since I don’t have at home any interesting [which I didn’t already shoot], I went empty-handed, hoping to find something interesting on the spot and found a bronze reproduction of an ancient Grecian helmet, something ringing home with all the Leonidas based stuff I did lately on the Fedora land. What can I say more? I am quite unhappy with the photos I made: bad focus, bad light, bad framing, but I wasn’t in the mood to try harder… needs some kicks in the pants :p
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To finally put the portrait and its photomanipulation to rest, I feel like a screencast (a video tutorial) is in place.
Note1: the soundtrack is made from freely licensed music by Severed Fifth;
Note2: I have the video available in its original format, at an incredible image quality, but the file is large, too large for what vide sharing sites allows, so I’m looking into the right way to publish it.
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I take seriously the freedom thing so my photos are never photoshoped, they are gimped instead :p So I used GIMP to touch the portrait I made the other day.
A first step was to play with the saturation, the initial colors are a bit too strong and the black and white is not bad at all:
Another interesting operation is to play with cropping and put in the spotlight what you think is the most interesting part of the picture:
And of course, unleash the gimping extravaganza going for a "glossy magazine cover" type of photography: heal the unwanted spots, soften the skin with selective gaussian blur, sharpen the eyes, lips and hair, other important details (the ring in this case) and, why not, alter the color of the eyes and lips. And stop here, while a bit of sanity is still preserved…
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Sunday was an exciting day at the photography course: we took portraits in the studio, with camera on a tripod and studio lights. Since most of my colleagues did shoots they can’t to at home (low key, dark with strong small lights and big shadows), I went the opposite way, with a high key photographs, for which I asked Anca, a blue eyed blonde colleague, to pose.
The main light is quite close to the camera, almost like in fashion portraits, with a second light on the right to ease the shadows and a yellow backlight to give some contour of the hair and make it golden. This photo is touched just a little (saturation, sharpness, a few blemishes removed), will follow later with more photomanipulation (I need time to play with GIMP and try various things).
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Obsessed with this week’s homework for the photography course I made a third composition, this time using some AA batteries.
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